Changes

|title=In Praise of Love

|author=Alain Badiou with Nicholas Truong

|publisher=Serpent's Tail

|date=April 2012

|summary=''Anyone who doesn't take love as their starting-point will never discover what philosophy is about''. I had a connection with the first half, but it won't last...

}}

''Love encompasses the experience of the possible transition from the pure randomness of chance to a state that has universal value. Starting out from something that is simply an encounter, a trifle, you learn that you can experience the world on the basis of difference and not only in terms of identity.'' In other words, when eyes look and worlds collide, the process of alteration that follows, is love. ''It is absolutely true that love can bend our bodies and prompt the sharpest torment. Love, as we can observe day in and day out, is not a long, quiet river.'' But it is not designed to be that way - just as a record is a lump of plastic before music has been carved on it, love is just a transaction if all the chance has been ironed out of it - as perhaps by an Internet match site questionnaire.